|
An Insistent And Indelicate Muse
© Patrick Califia ”The truth is often rude.”
—Mikal Shively, queer sage and Daddy Bear archetype
Asking why someone would write about sex is rather like asking why anyone would eat at a five-star French restaurant. The inherent pleasure of the activity in question seems rather obvious to me. As a pornographer, I am in the same position as the restaurant critic. I get to do something I love while being paid for it. Why would I ever stop writing about sex? Of course, this is a simplistic description of my vocation. It omits the deadbeat publishers who try to bowdlerize writing that scares them; checks that never quite stretch to cover all the bills; the disapproval of family, fellow pagans who are stuck in the cultural feminism of the ’70s, and other non-friends; the lack of serious critical attention (because everyone “knows” pornography requires no serious literary talent); the angst of putting something so personal out for public perusal; watching my dot-com friends buy new cars and houses while I agonize about when I can afford to change the oil in my 10-year-old Honda Civic and dodge calls from the landlord; and the mind-numbing challenge of finishing a collection of sexually explicit fiction despite chronic pain, yet another hacking chest cold, or a dry spell in which I haven’t had a new trick to inspire me for the last six months, thank you very much, Aphrodite. Some of these obstacles exist for any writer, no matter how staid. Creative work is badly paid and underrated. The rodeo announcer’s cautionary opening statement, “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys,” might more aptly be rephrased as, “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be artists.” Anybody who can look at the hump on a Brahma bull’s back, not to mention those very pointy horns, and still persist in the delusion that the creature is meant to be ridden gets no sympathy from me. But then, I have never felt the rope-burn of desire to sport one of those silver-and-turquoise trophy belt buckles as big as a dinner plate. (My Western genes do, however, predispose me to own a lot of multicolored, pointy-toed boots, and I prefer a big saddle when I go for a ride. Alas, I digress.) I have experienced the jones to write while stuck at a desk in Chevron Oil’s word-processing pool, watching precious irreplaceable hours of my life tick away like the sand in the Wicked Witch of the West’s hourglass, while I sent out form letters about credit cards. It hurt. A lot. I write because I must. I am motivated by a strong desire to avoid the pain caused by not writing. Any parallels between being an artist and a junkie are too obvious to be mentioned here. If it weren’t for pornography, I wonder if I’d ever have become a writer. In my early 20s, I was unable to keep (or publish) anything I’d written. The minute a poem or short story came out of the typewriter I loathed it so much that I destroyed it. The only way I got myself past this self-destruction was to make myself write something that was so forbidden and exciting that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I also told myself I never had to show it to anybody else. (This trick still works.) I’d never tied anybody up or spanked anyone, but my sexual fantasies were all about bondage and discipline. I found them scary and shameful, but could not relinquish the pleasure they gave me. So I had to find a way to own or integrate this part of myself. The result was “Jessie,” which later wound up being excerpted in Coming to Power and published in toto in Macho Sluts. At the time, it was the only piece of lesbian S/M porn—or lesbian porn of any sort, for that matter—that most of us had seen, so it circulated in photocopies of photocopies. For all I know it still travels in this samizdat format, encouraging more budding perverts to wear black velvet suits and put candles up their booties. Because there was no tradition of sex writing by and for lesbians, I had to use my imagination a lot. There were no cliches for me to fall back on. I did not know anyone who actually engaged in the acts I described, so I had to devote more time than porn writers usually do to filling out my characters. The challenge was to make the sex believable, to use the female characters in such a convincing way that the reader would be led step by step into a world where women actually said such things and got what they were begging for. Of course, I was also leading myself into that world. It was a case of life imitating art. I kept writing leatherdyke smut because I had to create the audience that would appreciate my work (and let me live out some of my fantasies in the real world). That is one thing that I believe makes my fiction unique, the fact that it built the very community that it celebrates. The message of Macho Sluts was, “You don’t have to just think about these things. There are other women who want them, too. Come and find us.” It will be interesting to see what happens to my fiction as a result of this gender transition I am making from female to male. I’m well aware that I’ve gotten away with breaking a lot of the rules because I was perceived as a woman and a dyke. Defending free speech and public sex and writing hard-core tales were unheard-of occupations for a lesbian in 1977. I worry that some of the things I have to say will be dismissed or seen as not particularly interesting if they come from a person who is living in a male identity. Right now I am struggling to figure out my relationship to the body of work I created before I started taking testosterone and using male pronouns. It’s very hard for me to do readings because my voice has changed. (Literally.) I understand how important it is for many lesbians to be in women-only space. I don’t want to ruin this safe place for women who need it. Yet I feel that I’ll probably continue to write lesbian porn, if only because there’s something rebellious and dangerous about two women looking for their hot zones together. But will lesbians still be willing to buy my work? Transgendered people are already turning up more often in my fiction. I keep asking myself, “Who will read this stuff? For that matter, who will publish it?” These worries slow me down. I’m 46, and I have a painful autoimmune disease. I don’t know if I have it in me to once more build a community by writing about it as if it already existed. At least I don’t have to start from scratch this time. Many leatherdykes have gone before me and come out as FTMs. There’s a strong international FTM movement, but a lot of transmen are freaked out by S/M and homophobic to boot. Do the rest of you care enough about gender issues to be interested in the sexual adventures of trannies? Does that turn you on? Despite the fact that I sometimes feel as if I am building a bridge out over the thin air of the Grand Canyon, I can’t imagine being able to stop writing about romance and all the other packages that sex comes in. The work itself is reinforcing, because as I write, I too am entertained, aroused, and educated. The things that hurt me lose their sharp edges and become more like a finished jigsaw puzzle than a Colt .45 with one bullet in the chamber. The act of creation is almost always an act of faith. It’s impossible to know, while you are making something new, exactly what it will be when it is finished or what will happen to it when it leaves your hands. The future is none of my business, partly because if I focus on the consequences, I will never have the tunnel vision and warped concentration of energy it takes to spin words into sentences. Although I don’t see anything wrong with writers and other artists being good businesspeople when it comes to attracting an audience for their work and the material means to continue it, I also think that the post-creation marketing stuff is the least important part of the entire process. It’s sad when a great painter, for example, is not appreciated until after their death. The probability that there are other great painters whose work will never be seen at all is even more tragic. But the work was still valuable, no matter how obscure. Each image was still a vocation and an obligation that the painters had to fulfill, just as the lion must fulfill its mandate to hunt, and the tides must follow the moon, rumpled like the bedcovers of a restless sleeper. Here are some of the other things I’ve learned in my career as a pornographer. By the time I put the manuscript of Macho Sluts together, I had discovered and read quite a bit of heterosexual and gay male S/M porn, and I found that a lot of it was unrealistic. When I read about sex acts that I knew were life-threatening or just physically impossible to perform, it bumped me out of the narrative-induced trance and made me feel uneasy and icky instead of aroused. Much of my fiction is written as much to entertain me as it is to grab a reader by their short hairs. I wanted images of S/M play that was edgy but do-able. This seemed to me to be much more subversive than the mass-marketed pulp paperback stuff that was far-fetched or all about people being maimed or killed. Bad, mass-market fetish porn implies that its subject matter could never be translated into the reader’s daily life or relationship. I wanted to depict people who got off on extreme things who still had jobs, apartments, bills to pay, and lovers to argue with and fuck. Even though I write about male/female sex whenever the urge strikes me, on the whole my work is about the perfection and grace of queer sex. When Dr. David Reuben said in the first edition of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) that one vagina plus another vagina equaled zero, he was just saying what most heterosexuals believed in 1969, albeit in a crude and piggy way. Straight people didn’t just hate dykes and fags then, they thought we were ridiculous, a dirty joke, struggling to make two identical bodies fit together in a way that would never work. Our determination (or compulsion) to succeed at this impossible task simply confirmed our mentally-ill status. Queer sex (especially lesbian sex) wasn’t just seen as being wrong, illegal, or sinful; it was seen as being on some level impossible. (Unless, of course, two hot chicks were making out while a straight guy watched, in which case it was just very effective foreplay for a heterosexual menage a trois.) My earliest ideas about sexuality came from a crazy fundamentalist Christian religion that sanctions only about 5% of the many possibilities people have for experiencing pleasure with one another. I was terrified to be gay. But when I actually experienced putting my body up against the body of a woman, all I felt was flesh on flesh. I was troubled by my ambivalence about having a female body, but I could not feel any wrong being done. Skin to skin, mouth to mouth, with our hands and our lips we crafted a sensuality that exceeded anything I’d known in my few shabby heterosexual trysts. Even though there is a large body of same-sex porn available now, it is still important for us to keep writing about this, the fact that when two men or two women desire one another, something morally good, spiritually rewarding, and physically gratifying transpires. We are not zeroes. We are like pi. We could go on to infinity without repeating ourselves.
While I may tell myself that the trash I’m typing is for my eyes only to get the rough draft out, an appreciative reader is just about the only anodyne for the painful and repetitive revision process that makes fiction inkworthy. This is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve often written about sex to seduce somebody. In fact, the dedications of most of my books are to people who no longer share my bed or my good graces. I once had a lover ask me to promise to never dedicate a book to her, as she feared this would jinx our relationship. If we define sex as stimulation that leads to orgasm, I could claim to have had sex with thousands of people via the pages of my books. (And all of it safe sex at that!) When I create some especially fiendish scene, one that might make readers inhale suddenly and sharply, or get goosebumps, there’s a certain kind of pleasure to be had from topping all those strangers. My sexually-explicit fiction documents the vagaries of my personal life, but it’s about everybody else’s love life too. Porn is one way to write sexual history—the slang, fashion, community institutions, music, controversies, mores, the signifiers and significance of sexual expression at various points in time and in several different sexual minority communities. Some authors would find that a horrifying prospect. They strive to create an archetypal erotic story that will be timeless. So they avoid, as much as possible, descriptors that would nail down a story’s location and time. Sometimes they also strive to eliminate descriptive details of their characters’ appearance or personalities. Their goal is to create an erotic Everyman or Anywoman, Piers Plowman at the Last Chance Lap Dance Saloon. The Story of the Eye; Harriet Marwood, Governess; and Spanking the Maid are amazing achievements in this genre. When writers with less skill attempt this feat, it blows up in their faces, because it’s pretty easy to blunder and wind up with a story that is colorless and boring, and looks like a lazy, half-hearted effort at realizing a fantasy.
But it’s almost impossible to separate action from context. In time, these works too will provide readers with historical data as well as arousal, though they won’t be as rich as Fanny Hill or My Secret Life. These two books are good examples of the strategy I prefer, because I believe it makes the work more potent—diving into a wealth of detail, creating a complete picture of where the sex is taking place. I think this plunges the reader more deeply into a vicarious experience. But every technique has its weakness. The writer who wants to convey an accurate sense of the times they live in risks seeming quaint or unintentionally humorous to the next generation. (I know who among you have laughed at the author’s photo in Macho Sluts.) Clothes, language, religions, governments, and table manners come and go. But a new generation of readers can overlook a few anachronisms if they find something in a narrative that reflects their inner life. That’s why I believe it is so important in fiction, whether it’s erotic or not, to focus on the emotions, beliefs, and needs of the characters. Human nature has not changed all that much in 7,000 years of recorded history. The epic tale of Gilgamesh and Enkiddu is still comprehensible to the modern reader, even if we miss some of the religious references. Beowulf and the myths of Egypt still fascinate us, because we want to know what is going to happen to all those people next, even if we think their clothes are weird. If a writer is able to accurately portray how a character feels, the work stands a better chance of holding up under Father Time’s big pink eraser.
If anything renders a piece of fiction quickly obsolete, it is an absence of desire, whether the author’s point is to convey a sense of its frustration or fulfillment. I write porn in part to balance out all the Western fiction that makes it invisible. I’ve never understood why so many writers willingly extirpated sex from their narratives. How can we understand any character in a play, short story, or novel without knowing something about their pleasure-seeking behavior? Jane Austen should always be read alongside contemporary explicit depictions of sex. The understanding of one can only enrich our understanding of the other. One of the things I love most about describing passion is the chance to imagine or empathize with how it affects people who are very different from myself. There was such a need for sexy lesbian entertainment that I put most of my energy into this kind of work. But I live in the whole world, not a gay ghetto, and I wanted to get inside the heads of straight men, straight women, gay men, people who were violent, people who were victimized, people who lived in different worlds. It really pleases me when I hear from heterosexual readers or genetic gay men who have responded to stories that were about people like them. I also like what happens when sexual minorities begin to read one another’s scripts for reaching orgasm. We all have enough in common to motivate us, hopefully, to be kind to one another, and enough differences to keep us seeming exotic and attractive. Most subcultures rely on staying underground to survive. We often want to keep our secrets because we are afraid that other people will distort or misuse the very personal experiences that make our lives meaningful and happy. Any work that celebrates a stigmatized way of being in the world cuts two ways. It is both celebratory and revealing, sometimes dangerously so. I’ve often been asked how I feel about straight men reading my lesbian porn, and that would be hard to answer without taking it case-by-case. I’ve only gotten one letter from a straight guy who was so utterly clueless that he interpreted my work to mean women like abuse. I’m pretty sure he held that opinion before he ever ran into my byline. Gay culture is no longer the secret property of the friends of Dorothy. It’s out there for anyone to scrutinize. Many straight men don’t like lesbian porn written by and for lesbians. Why should they? There’s no role for them in those scenarios. On the other hand, just as there are dykes who love boys-only videos, there are some heterosexuals who like to go someplace else when they are fantasizing. We have straight allies. There are people who are not gay who like us and enjoy participating in certain aspects of our lives. Heterosexual men also read lesbian-identified porn to educate themselves about female sexuality. If just one straight girl got a decent bit of head because her boyfriend read one of my books, I’m happy. I think that if we keep quiet about our fetishes and rituals, we make ourselves seem less substantial or real, even to each other. Whatever safety we might be able to buy by eschewing representation of our excitement or orgasms isn’t worth the damage it does to render ourselves mute and blind. Oddly enough, a lot of the smut I write isn’t necessarily intended to stimulate a mad bout of jilling or jacking off. I like to use the cover of eroticism to entice the reader and make them emotionally and psychologically vulnerable to new ideas or discomfiting information. I hold out the reward of dirty talking in exchange for the reader stretching their political muscles. People are reluctant to think about many of the issues surrounding sex and gender. Or there’s a knee-jerk reaction that reflects what ”everybody knows” to be true. Some of the topics I’ve chosen to tackle this way are barebacking, relapse from safer sex precautions, AIDS and lesbians, rape, drug laws, queer youth, police brutality, domestic violence, censorship, addiction, racism, and class differences. The bittersweet presence of sex in these narratives hopefully motivates the reader to hold on to the ambiguity or conflict that is often more accurate or truthful than coming down on one side of an issue or the other. The lesson to think, question, and humanize rather than blame, judge, or jump to conclusions lingers far longer than it would have after a lecture.
Most of the political or ethical criticism in my work is aimed at the larger society, because that is the locus of the hatred and discrimination we live with every day. As sexual minority communities become larger and stronger, I think it’s important to also question the mores or policies that they develop to socialize new members, regulate the conduct of insiders, and handle relationships with outsiders. This is pretty hard to do, since oppressed minorities already take a lot of grief. But very few people become saints just because they are persecuted. I’m uncomfortable with anything that’s written on stone and handed down from the mountaintop by a superior being. I want to live in a world where women are taken seriously, pleasure is not stigmatized, there’s good sex education and equal access to healthcare, and my people are valued instead of being persecuted. A lot of that is beyond my control, not in the power of anyone who owns a leather jacket to give or take away. But we can also be pretty nasty to one another, in our marginalized subcultures, and I like to remind fellow outlaws that we are accountable for this bad behavior. I would like to live in a world in which everyone who’s a minority would not be looking for somebody who is further down in the hierarchy so they can stomp on their head. My work is founded on respect for the reader. I assume that most people can tell the difference between a book of fantasy and a how-to manual, and I believe we should all seek out diverse points of view, to keep our brains from fossilizing. This presupposes a certain level of intelligence and maturity which censors can’t credit the average person with. (Protection is not the same thing as respect.) Even though I write about pain and suffering (which are two different things), I hope my work is infused with a sense of compassion as well. Sadomasochists are able to express love for aspects of their partners’ being which are usually objects of repulsion or scorn. We represent the capacity to seize hope, love, and dignity under adverse circumstances. By celebrating what is beautiful and righteous about forbidden forms of intimacy, I try to provide comfort and a sense of connection to others, both mortal and divine. There’s so much loneliness, depression, fear, and loss in the world. This is the spiritual dimension of sex writing for me: to create fellowship and community so that we can take care of one another, to praise the material or physical manifestations of our creator, and delineate the value of tragedy as well as ecstasy. I have lost so many of the people I began this journey of sexual exploration with—lost them to AIDS, drugs, car crashes, murder, suicide, old age, cancer. I continue to write about topics they would find amusing because I have been left behind to bear witness. Every controversy I foment, every pair of knickers I tie in a knot, are my memorial to the beloved dead. The project of ending sexual repression and hatred of people who are bisexual, homosexual, or transgendered is still necessary. If I cannot heal the grief I feel, I can at least make it a little lighter by making myself useful.
© 2001 Patrick Califia
Patrick Califia is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books about radical sexuality, most of which were published under the name Pat Califia. At the time when this was written, he had just begun the process of changing his social gender from female to male. He lives in San Francisco with his partner, Matt Rice, and their son. He is also in private practice as a therapist, and is an ordained member of the pagan clergy.
|
|
